Reasons for Hope

Information and examples from around that world that provides me with a positive perspective on the future.

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Looking For A Point Of Departure For Our Future

This post includes two threads which complement each other. The first is a set of articles that critique Labour’s approach to politics as a response to the last 25-40 years. I found them a fascinating and provocative read and would recommend them to anyone who wants to make sense of what is going on in the UK and how we might begin to create positive, progressive change:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/it-was-centrist-dads-who-lost-it/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/corbyn-was-intensely-moral-never-working-class-hero/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/labour-should-have-argued-against-last-40-years-not-just-last-ten/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/labour-let-right-shape-both-sides-brexit-debate/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/take-right-wing-media-we-need-build-political-movement/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/history-clear-labour-must-lead-alliance-democratic-reform/

The second is a video which looks to explain the generational divide in politics and how this can provide a basis for moving into the future in a way that resists the polarisation of society. It considers the effects of assets as the most effective source of wealth growth, and how this feeds into society by gradually coagulating power and control in fewer sources who then dominate over others:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpBptQ3ZIOI

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Money as political and social

This is a post that explains how money does not emerge from markets alone, but is a politically and socially originating entity, and how debt based money is a political choice: https://theconversation.com/amp/neoliberalism-has-tricked-us-into-believing-a-fairytale-about-where-money-comes-from-113783

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Taiwan looking forwards

Here’s a really interesting account of how revolutionary action by a conservative anarchist, Audrey Tang, among others, has made a big difference to the involvement of participatory democracy in Taiwan, with the employment of modern technological innovations to change the political dynamics with the country:

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/23-digital-democracy-is-within-reach

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Graeber on Debt

These are some really interesting podcasts that outline David Graeber’s really informative account of Debt that he first shared in the book, which challenge the often accepted version of how the economic systems many people treat as natural emerged. However these are much more digestable for those not inclined to read a long book. There are two ways to listen to them, in 15 min episodes, or if you look down the bottom tow omnibus episodes where the shorter episodes are collected into two long episodes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b054zdp6

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Participatory Budgeting as a route to growing political engagement

It often strikes me that one of the main problems with liberalism’s obfuscation of politics with its reliance upon a sense of economic technocracy is the disengagement it encourages. Outsourcing our political problems as economic or technical problems to others either more expert or most willing to grapple with the problem at least in part contributes to our own sense of disempowerment over the defining aspects of our lives as social beings who live together. As such whilst not a sole solution, the notion of participatory budgeting does seem to offer to open a door into reengagement. Drawing members of society into considerations over how to commit what are never infinite resources does offer the opportunity to see how economic and technical decisions are never just this, but are also politically decided. From such a beginning there is then an opportunity to question and build a sense of what our political commitments might be and we might begin to enact them. To this end here are a few articles on how the process has been taken up in different ways:

https://www.eurozine.com/participatory-budgeting-an-empowering-democratic-institution/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X13000156

https://reykjavik.is/en/better-reykjavik-0

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/madrid-as-democracy-lab/

 

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Are You Too Busy?

This video considers how the development of the Neoliberal form of capitalism was characterised by a response to consciousness raising by looking to deflate consciousness: to inhibit the role consciousness raising can play in uniting people through an awareness that their similar problems are not their own fault but the result of structural factors that weight the system against them.  It incorporates an explanation of how time pressure is one tool used to limit such resistance, and identifies the relationship, or antagonism, between The Beatles and fatalism, amongst other things.

 

 

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Some Political Things to Read

Here is a video by Aaron Bastani that shares a reading list of 20 books, possibly for reading during the lockdown, depending on when you notice it.  They seemed to be poised to giving you one sense of how the world we live might develop in the future:

Also mentioned in the video are these articles from a similar source:

 

Eighteen Books to Read on Lockdown

http://luxurycommunism.com/2020/03/18/20-books-to-read-while-in-self-isolation/